Public Computing Services Democratizing Information

If you find PCS useful and want to support its continued growth, please make a donation. Your donations help pay for development costs, infrastructure and promotion of public computing services. Specifically, we need financial assistance to purchase bandwidth and keep our servers running.

Primarily, we hope the public will support PCS beause we help close the digital divide. Our contribution to community building is to give everyone better, if not quite equal, access to computing services. We hope that the long term benefits include a better informed, self-sufficent public.

We think computing services will result in a more informed, better educated public for two reasons. First, with better access to computing services, more people will learn the computing skills that they need to be self-sufficient. Secondly, if a larger portion of the public can create and share information easily, the population as a whole should be better informed. That's one of the principles that PCS shares with other public information sources such as the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio, and local cable access television. We think the public will support PCS for similar reasons.

A side benefit of public computing services is waste reduction. By providing computing services, we reduce the need for waste-producing processing like printing, copying and shipping. We help publich charities leverage under-utilized resources. Most charities only use a small fraction of the storage space and bandwidth provided by their web hosts. We help them distribute these resources to the public. By using, and contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), we reduce development effort for all computing services. FOSS reduces 'reinventing the wheel' where competing commercial sofware delopment spends resources creating nearly identical solutions for computing needs.

Another side benefit is that public computing services can lessen the burden on governments. In addition to helping public charities distribute services to the public, we help them streamline their own technology. They can devote reduce their need for resources, and spend more of their resources on their missions, as opposed to keeping up with technology.